This blog features many contact center industry news stories and also assembles tips for improving agent performance and customer experience, helping teams evolve into world class contact centers. It's an open forum for call center supervisors, agents, vendors and managers to contribute news, stories, anecdotes and other useful information with their peers. Industry vendors and analysts are encouraged to share client success stories.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

One of our newest customers, a large wireless provider scores big business benefits by integrating Virtual Observer and Avaya Interaction Center.

An award-winning wireless carrier that has operated in the Southeastern United States since 1999 and in parts of the Caribbean since 2004, they have more than 1,900 people and five business offices. The wireless company lives and breathes “customers come first”, with a committent to provide the highest quality network, simple and straight-forward service plans that deliver real value, and the best products available on the market. Customer care associates are available 24 hours a day, everyday to quickly and politely assist customers with their questions and concerns.

The wireless carrier’s contact center handles an average of 35,000 calls per day. They wanted to implement a call recording system to maximize the performance of their agents within the center. After reviewing several options, they chose Coordinated Systems, Inc.’s (CSI) Virtual Observer solution, based on the value, price and quality the solution offered. With 114 supervisors managing the agents, it would be extremely important for the supervisors to quickly get on board with the system. Clearly, the software seems to have earned some fans, as one supervisor was quoted to say “Virtual Observer is extremely easy to use, easy to learn and the ability to coach associates based on the screen shots. It also has a much higher accuracy rate for recordings compared with our previous recording software. An integrated evaluation form reduces the need to have a 3rd party monitor form solution.” He added “CSI’s customer service has been superb. They are always available for assistance and return calls/emails very quickly.”

The wireless provider runs an Avaya phone system with Avaya Interaction Center (AIC). It was vital for the winning call recording vendor to offer a tight integration with AIC. An IT engineer at the wireless company stated “Virtual Observer works extremely well within our IC environment. It allows VO to capture recordings based off of CTI Triggers to reduce the length of unnecessary recordings and speed up the quality monitoring process. It also allows us to see the account that the associate has on their screen.” Additional business benefits include reduced recording size and reduced storage space needed, improved performance by QA associates. “Custom CTI Triggers by CSI allowed us to record based on call type,” he added.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

This customer purchased Virtual Observer Logger for their Avaya phone system in multiple locations. What made this particular installation unique was the fact that all of the agents were on a Citrix environment instead of Windows computers. The customer needed to be up and running ASAP and our professional implementation team did not dissapoint. Two weeks from purchase order to fully implemented and trained. We trained a brand new QA manager, a former Witness user, who was very impressed with the quality and ease VO brings to his staff.

In this particular instance we replaced a Dictaphone call recording system that gave them difficulty in finding specific calls. This was a basic business need which was easy using Virtual Observer.

Notes: The utility contacted 27 companies regarding Screen Capture in a Citrix environment and we were the only company that was able to accomplish this.

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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

DiaTri Opens Its Second national Call CenterDiaTri, the leader in national diagnostic network and scheduling services is pleased to announce the opening of its second national call center. This second call center will be located in the Tampa, FL area and will provide a very nice complement to DiaTri’s home office and call center based in the southern suburbs of Chicago, IL.

Harte-Hanks adding 500 permanent call center jobsTexarkana will soon be home to a new call center that could employ as many as 500 permanent and up to 250 seasonal employees. Harte-Hanks is an international direct and targeted marketing company. Company officials say the facility was a strong factor, along with the community's enthusiasm for what is expected to be a boon to the local economy. Hiring has not yet begun for the new call center they hope to begin that process in the near future. They're expected to up and running sometime early next year.

Sovereign Bank to add more jobs to call centerSovereign Bank today announced the expansion of its call center in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The bank will increase the call center’s second shift, which operates in the evening hours until 11 p.m. EST, adding more than 30 additional call center positions, an increase of 30% over the positions created last year.

AT&T opens new call centerThe new Joplin AT&T call center opened Wednesday with nearly half of the construction completed and 180 of the estimated 600 employees the site ultimately needs at work.When complete, the building will have 572 customer service workstations, 39 manager workstations and 26 back offices.

New call center to hire 100 more people in next 2 monthsResults Bellingham handles inbound calls for two major clients in the health-care and energy industries, answering questions from those clients’ customers. About the jobs: Call Human Resources Manager Shawna Monroe at 671-0467, ext. 102. It has started training 30 new employees. to bring its work force to about 65. The company plans to add more than 100 people during the next two months to bring the work force to approximately 175. Results-Tel is a CSI customer and uses Virtual Observer for call recording and quality monitoring.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

In the marketing department here at Coordinated Systems, Inc., we get a ton of leads and inquiries for call recording. Half of the leads that come in fall into our sweet spot, which is call recording for quality assurance. The best leads are from contact centers looking to record agent interactions in order to train them and improve their performance.

Occasionally we'll receive leads from companies who are simply looking to record all their calls, typically for legal/liability or dispute resolution reasons. More and more companies also need to log calls for standards compliance. Virtual Observer can certainly work as a standalone logger. Of course, the real value does exist in the quality assurance functionality, but as a logger, it's still a great tool.

Most pure loggers simply record the calls and store them in a network drive and allow you to play them back if need be. Virtual Observer gives you a visual playback mechanism which shows the entire call's audio wave, along with a synchronized view of the agent's screen activity. With the agent tagging module, agents can categorize the call and identify the customer. Of course, with CTI integration, such data will automatically be associated with the call. If you need to locate a call, you can either browse and sort by any or all available data fields, or you can search via our easy-to-use query wizard, again with the ability to search on any available data fields. Data such as time of day call started, length of call, agent, ANI, DNIS, customer name, customer industry, etc., should be available, depending on what level of integration you've configured.

Maynard Webb, CEO, formerly of Ebay, stated "We are thrilled to be working with these very successful shows. It's clearly a testament to our technology as well as the quality of our virtual community of home agents. Because of this unique combination, no other contact centers can handle the call volatility that goes along with this industry."

In related news, Ebay posted a loss on Skype, which many are now declaring a failure. You can read more about in this blog rant.

Speaking of a distributed call center, wouldn't it make sense for telecommuters to use an online office suite vs. having them use an installed client version of Microsoft Office? With the new online version of Office or with the Google Apps suite, there are no installation issues, missing files, or availability issues. Have you tried the online apps? The Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations apps are pretty simple to use and it's convenient for sharing docs with family members or between work and home PCs. Software as a service is becoming a reality. You only need to see Microsoft jumping on the concept for proof positive.

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